As embedded systems evolve, there is greater dependency on the real-time operating system (RTOS) to abstract the complex hardware. In return for the services provided, the RTOS consumes CPU cycles, thereby imposing a processing overhead on the CPU. In this paper, we review some of the techniques that have been proposed in literature for reducing the CPU utilisation by the RTOS primitives, including our… work on two specific platforms — a multi-core processor and a soft-core processor. We clearly demonstrate that the benefits of adopting a suitable RTOS acceleration strategy are significant. We also look at some of the challenges that face the RTOS industry if they are to adopt these mechanisms. It is our belief that the self-maintaining nature of open source software makes it a very viable candidate for benefiting from these approaches.

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